Editor's Note: Couldn't Call It Unexpected

Is Any PC Intuitively Easy to Use?

September 25, 2000

"And we keep making the same mistake over
and over again. Everyone (with the exception of
myself and a few clinically insane individuals)
believes that Linux has extraordinary potential.
Yes, it's supposed to be stable, a mark in its
favor, and it is a really cool and radical model
of how to develop a new product. But how much of the buying public has
the slightest clue as to how to use
Linux?"
--Richard L. Brandt, Upside

It has come to this. Having failed to
successfully attack Linux on the basis of too
many distributions and of not having enough
applications, the FUDmeisters are now coming
after Linux for not being easy enough to use.
The "usability" experts--the kind
that charge $40,000 a day in fees--have
proclaimed that the Linux interface is just too
different to actually use.

What a crock.

What the "usability" experts like Brandt
and Jakob Nielsen don't like to tell you is that
usability is subjective and relative. What seems
simple and intuitive to one person can be obscure
and difficult to another.

You see, we all bring our personal experiences
to computing. What a 39-year-old Minnesotan with
an English degree knows is quite different from what a
20-year-old waiter in Mexico brings to the table--and both are totally different from what a
eight-year-old reared on Gameboy brings. We all
chuckle when older people complain that their
VCRs are too difficult to program, and I'm sure
my son and his friends are chuckling when I
proclaim their Pokemon Yellow
games running on GameBoys are too difficult to
master quickly. My mother has never
used a computer and wouldn't know
where to begin if she tried, and
conversely I wouldn't know what to do
if she set me in front of her
20-year-old Singer sewing machine and
told me to make a pair of slacks. Similarly, I
remember being daunted by all the controls on the
International Harvester Farmall H Series tractor I drove when I was 15 hauling hay from the field to the farm. To my father, born and raised on a farm, driving that simple little H was a breeze.

Now, before you start complaining that a
computer is more difficult to use than a
tractor, quiet down: in most ways it's really not.
There's no documentation with a tractor, and
apart from some basic features that are easy to
grasp (like the steering wheel), there's no way
you could drive an older tractor through sheer
intuition: I doubt that most of you would know
where the throttle was (bonus points if you mail
me with the correct location, and here's a hint--it's not by your feet), let alone how to start
it.

My point isn't to highlight mass ignorance of
tractor-control layouts, but to point out that
usability is highly relative, and why Brandt's
statement is just too bizarre. No, a GNOME or KDE
desktop doesn't look like a Macintosh desktop,
but anyone who has used a Mac could easily use a
typical GNOME or KDE installation. The same
goes for a Windows or CDE user. And you know what?
Netscape on Linux works a lot like Netscape on
Windows or even Internet Explorer on Windows.
Corel WordPerfect for Linux works a lot like
Microsoft Word. And so on.

But listen to the usability experts, and
they'll tell you that Linux is too difficult to
use and could do with a dose of simplicity. (This
is essentially what Eazel is trying to tell the
Linux world, by the way.) But interface design is
not advertising, and while the best advertising
has the clearest message simply told, there's
really no "best" interface for a computer or the
"best" design for a Web page. According to the
usability experts, the best Web page has a
striking design and just enough data to draw out
a user. Of course, Yahoo--with its data-rich
text-based interface--pretty much blows the
usability experts out of the water. (Come to
think of it, a usability expert would have a
heart attack after seeing the Linux Today
home page as well.)

So when I hear the usability experts slamming KDE
or GNOME, I write off their statements to sheer
ignorance. Don't let the FUDmeisters fool you:
Linux is no more difficult to use than any other
operating system, and fear of the new--which,
in reality, is what folks like Brandt are really
expressing--is no reason to avoid embracing
Linux.